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The Dollar General 200 Fueled by Amerigas NASCAR Nationwide Series (NNS) race at Phoenix International Raceway (PIR) (1-mile tri-oval) – Avondale, AZ

 

 

Start Position: 19

Finish Position: 7

Status: Running

Current Driver Points: 1 (tied)

 

 

·Hornish started the event 19th based on his lap of 27.714 seconds at 129.898 mph during Saturday morning’s qualifying session.

·On the second lap of the race Hornish was involved in a crash that resulted in significant damage to the front of his No. 12 Penske Ford. The Detroit Genuine Parts car would pit four times during the ensuing caution period, yet the team kept the wounded machine on the lead lap.

·During a lap 103 yellow flag pit-stop, crew chief Greg Erwin called for two tires allowing the No. 12 Mustang to advance to the sixth position.  The car’s handling did not respond well to the two tire change and Hornish spun on the restart.

·Great fuel mileage allowed Hornish to stay out at lap 152 when many leaders pitted which moved him to fourth. Hornish held on to his battle worn Penske Ford and finished seventh.

 

“I felt like from the first couple laps right after we started there that we were going be decent, but then, we took two tires, and it was just all over the place. We came back in after I spun and put four tires on it, and the car was pretty good, so to be able to come back the way we did just says a lot about this team and the hard work they’re putting into it.”  

“You never want to be in anything on lap two, but we didn’t completely kill the front end where we had to pull anything off and have openings. Yeah, it was mangled, but at the end of the day it was still all there, so that was the best part.  Whatever is different about our radiators from last year by being in these Fords, if we would have had a hit like that last year, I guarantee we would have been coming back and putting in a new radiator.  So whatever Ford Racing and the engineers did to try and get these radiators down a little bit lower helped us out a lot today.”